This is perplexing. I have a backlog of ethics stories and issues that I feel are better mentioned in the Warm-Up format, then that post run long, and the items in my basket of deplorable often get superseded by new issues, and are never seen here at all. The collective approach saves amazing amounts of time, so if I have to post each of the leftovers individually, that will preclude doing the work necessary on potentially more significant issues.

Well, today, at least, I’m posting on some of the morning issues that didn’t make the cut.

And this is why Royals used to avoid marrying commoners.

What an Ethics Dunce, and worse, soon-to-be Royal father-in-law Thomas Markle is! Your daughter is unexpectedly in the middle of a world event (not that it should be that), and she is approaching the most exciting day of her life. One of your two duties is to be on hand to walk her down the aisle, and your other duty is not to screw things up for her and embarrass her. Markle couldn’t do either, because, it is evident, he is a low-life, the real equivalent of Eliza Doolittle’s father in “My Fair Lady,” who after years of neglect has to try to cash in on his daughter’s good fortune.

The father of the soon-to-be royal bride couldn’t resist cashing in, doing several photoshoots with a paparazzi agency ahead of the wedding. The news reports of this provoked a negative reaction, predictably, except Tommy Boy was too greedy or dumb to predict it, and now he says that he will not attend because he does not want to embarrass Meghan or the royal family.

Too late!

Are there really people who think this is legitimate criticism?

I suppose there are, but wow. A politically active genealogist named Jennifer Mendelsohn—she’s an idiot, by the way—spends her time digging into the ancestry of critics of illegal immigration and illegal immigrants to prove they are hypocrites, or something. Her latest target is Fox News’s Tomi Lahren (I am not a fan) and Mendelsahn really seems to think she has uncovered a “gotcha!,” tweeting…

Except the 1930 census says Tomi’s 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German. Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English. Her great-grandfather’s 1895 baptism from MN? Recorded in Norwegian…But as long as people like Lahren continue to push a specious agenda that suggests today’s immigrants are somehow wholly different from previous ones, I’ll keep showing just how alike they really are.

I really do think the wretched quality of thought here is more characteristic of most illegal immigration activists than people are willing to admit. I’m sure you can do this analysis yourself, but…

Illegal immigrants are not the same as legal immigrants. That what was once legal is no longer doesn’t make what the legal immigrants did in 1900 wrong, or what illegal immigrants doing now right.

There is nothing hypocritical about a citizen with immigrants in their lineage condemning illegal immigration. Indeed, there would be nothing wrong with someone with illegal immigrants in their family doing the same. If my great, great grandfather was a pirate, I can still oppose piracy. If I exist because my great-grandmother was raped, there is nothing wrong with my opposing rapists.

Did I mention that Mendelsohn is an idiot?

Just wanted to make sure.

Best rejoinder to her tweet: “Now do Elizabeth Warren!”

It’s so much easier to blame the NRA, the Second Amendment, President Trump and Republicans, though!

The Broward school district’s repeated, emphatic — and it turns out, false — statements that Nikolas Cruz had not been in a controversial disciplinary program fit a pattern of an institution on the defensive and under siege.

Facing significant legal and political exposure over the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the district has tried to keep information from the public and put out untrue and misleading statements, frustrating parents who say this is the time for maximum transparency.

The district is fighting in court against the release of school surveillance video. It flatly refused to issue any records regarding the shooting to the news media, in a possible violation of the state’s open-records law. Superintendent Robert Runcie has blocked critics, including parents, from his Twitter account. More than two months after the shooting, a Broward Sheriff’s detective told a state commission on school safety that he was still waiting for the district to provide all of Cruz’s disciplinary records.

Meanwhile, the Astroturfed Children’s Army’s false narrative that the shooting could have “easily” been prevented by stricter gun laws is still being injected into the public’s mind via demonstrations, interviews, news features and Democratic propaganda.

Yesterday the Seattle City Council passed an “employee head tax,” which imposes a $275 a year surtax for employees at companies making more than $20 million a year. The tax is designed to raise about $47 million a year for homelessness and affordable housing services. It has been nicknamed the “Amazon tax” because about $20 million expected to come from Jeff Bezos’s baby.

This is how you lose companies and jobs while increasing homelessness. When the vote was pending, Amazon said through a spokesmen, “I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sublease all space in our recently leased Rainier Square building.” never mind. Socialism is all about what should work, not what actually does. And yes, it is irresponsible to pass laws that violate Economics 101, but the hard-left City Council has a flat learning curve. A Seattle Times op-ed earlier this month pointed out that in the past two years the city has increased spending on housing and homelessness by 50%, and homelessness has risen 37%.

As you can see, Lahren’s critique of modern-day immigrants is not that they are breaking the law; she doesn’t specify that she is talking about illegal immigrants at all:

These people need to understand that it’s a privilege to be an American and it’s a privilege that you work toward. It’s not a right. You don’t just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That’s not what this country is based on.

Her critique is that immigrants are low skilled, poorly educated, and don’t speak the language, not that they are immigrating illegally. She didn’t condemn illegal immigrants at all in the portion Mendelsohn was responding to.

Mendelsohn’s rebuttal–that this country has always has such immigrants, and that the modern day problems that people like Lahren have with them are nothing new–is thus perfectly valid.

So you’ve accused Mendelsohn of conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants, when it was actually you who made that conflation.

1. I linked to Mendelson’s twitter account, from whence the tweets come.
2. “These people need to understand that it’s a privilege to be an American and it’s a privilege that you work toward. It’s not a right. You don’t just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That’s not what this country is based on.”

She was referring to illegal immigrants Shame on you for trying to skirt that. Here, let me explain the obvious:

“These people [that is, illegal immigrants] need to understand that it’s a privilege to be an American [That is, you don’t have a right to come here just because you want to] and it’s a privilege that you work toward [As in applying and following the law, then qualifying for citizenship.] It’s not a right. {It isn’t a right, you know.] You don’t just come into this country [illegally] with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice [that is, you decided to, in defiance of the law.] That’s not what this country is based on.”

3. You conveniently (and dishonestly) ignore Mendlsohn’s website, the whole point of which is to show that illegal immigration critics are in the US because of practices they criticize. What do you think “resistance genealogy” refers to, the flu?

I’m at a loss as to what your standard is for when it’s OK to infer what a conservative speaker is saying and when it isn’t. Is it “It’s OK when the inference helps the conservative speaker, but not OK when it doesn’t?”

My point stands: Lahren’s main critique there was of immigrants’ low skills and low education, not the lawbreaking. I’m basing this on what she said, not mind-reading, as you are doing. If the critique is that they are law-breakers, then it isn’t even necessary to mention their education or skills.

You conveniently (and dishonestly) ignore Mendlsohn’s website

I’d really like for you to explain to me how it’s possible for me to conveniently and dishonestly ignore something that I didn’t even know existed.

No, Chris, you are basing it on the false narrative that conservatives like her don’t like immigrants. I’ve heard her. I’ve read her. She is anti-illegal immigration, and anyone paying attention knows what she was talking about in that statement. So does Mendelson, and you ignored HER context as well.

“Sealioning is a type of Internet trolling which consists of bad-faith requests for evidence, or repeated questions, the purpose of which is not clarification or elucidation, but rather an attempt to derail a discussion or to wear down the patience of one’s opponent.”

Lahren’s critiques apply to both legal and illegal immigrants, and isn’t about the illegal nature of the act all. I’m just going to repeat this part of my earlier comment:

My point stands: Lahren’s main critique there was of immigrants’ low skills and low education, not the lawbreaking…If the critique is that they are law-breakers, then it isn’t even necessary to mention their education or skills.

Chris, I was responding to “I’m at a loss as to what your standard is for when it’s OK to infer what a conservative speaker is saying and when it isn’t. Is it “It’s OK when the inference helps the conservative speaker, but not OK when it doesn’t?””. It’s ok to infer their intent when there is clear and unambiguous context to provide the inference.

Legal immigrants are, as a general rule, expected to maintain employment. Unless you want to dig into the chain migration rathole and family based migration, I’m going to leave it at that.

The Watter’s World clip that the Fox News tweet is lifted from has incredibly more *illegal immigration* context than the single quote from the Fox News tweet. I wonder if Fox News had a headliner or something that indicated it in the tweet?

A banner saying something like “Kelly Gets Candid on Illegal Immigration” would be useful clarification as the topic being discussed by pretend journalist Tomi Lahren was Kelly’s *anti illegal immigration* comments of his own. They should have included that.

Of course, the full Watter’s World clip provides even more context clearly indicating that the tweet’s quote was lifted from a larger commentary about illegal immigration. But I neither expect a Fox News tweet of a pretend Journalist being taken out of context by another pretend journalist in hopes of a gotcha moment to provide any useful context to permit any nuanced discussion.

Of course pretend journalist Mendelsohn thinks bringing up centuries old immigration practice is a relevant rebuttal to modern arguments about what set of immigrants we should or should not permit in a more mature Republic. It isn’t a relevant rebuttal, even if the arguments rebutted are silly or serious.

“Mendelsohn’s rebuttal–that this country has always has such immigrants, and that the modern day problems that people like Lahren have with them are nothing new–is thus perfectly valid.”

Except it’s wrong. We aren’t in 1895 anymore Chris, we are a more skilled, more educated, more knowledgeable people after 120 years of societal evolution, and what may have passed the bar back then does not necessarily pass it now.

Would a German national that doesn’t speak English make the cut today? I doubt it.

Does this mean that Tomi is slamming the door on people like her? The average German (56% according to Wikipedia) speaks enough English to get by, had Tomi’s Grandparents been indicative of the population at large at that time, then chances are they’d be good to go today as well.

If you believe that America’s ability to take in immigrants is finite… Even if you disagree on what the number is, but so long as you accept that it’s a finite number, then it is in America’s best interest to take in immigrants according to a formula designed, even if imperfectly, to find merit.

I honestly can’t think of many more disqualifying attributes than breaking the law (which all illegal immigrants do as a function of their illegal immigration, if nothing else) and not being able to communicate with the people around you…. Regardless of what the language is that you speak, if you have a language barrier with the majority of the nation you’re trying to immigrate to, it makes integration SO much harder.

Of coures, I addressed Chris “rebuttal” directly in the post, writing that “Illegal immigrants are not the same as legal immigrants. That what was once legal is no longer doesn’t make what the legal immigrants did in 1900 wrong, or what illegal immigrants doing now right.”

However, Chris does get credit for answering the question in the heading, “Are there really people who think this is legitimate criticism?” Chris proves the answer is yes, and not only that, non-brain damaged people. Which is terrifying.

Ugh. It isn’t “nothing new and thus valid.” Tomi’s objection is that low-skilled, poorly educated immigrants who don’t speak the language damage the country and don’t contribute anything. Pointing out the success stories of those immigrants’ descendants proves that objection wrong.

No, it doesn’t. 150 years ago, such immigrants came and assimilated, didn’t collect welfare, weren’t in hiding, didn’t demand special translators in school, were motivated to assimilate, couldn’t get mainstream jobs if they didn’t, etc, etc. They were also LEGAL.

As Mendelsohn points out, they assimilated just as much as immigrants today, if not less so. There is plenty of evidence that today’s immigrants learn the language faster, among other metrics of assimilation.

Good job proving Mendelsohn’s central thesis correct: But as long as people like Lahren continue to push a specious agenda that suggests today’s immigrants are somehow wholly different from previous ones, I’ll keep showing just how alike they really are.

“But as long as people like Lahren continue to push a specious agenda that suggests today’s immigrants are somehow wholly different from previous ones, I’ll keep showing just how alike they really are.”

But they AREN’T, Chris…. it’s what you don’t understand… If you have to compare immigrants from 120 years ago to illegal immigrants today in order to find a comparison, then you’ve already fucked up royally. Think of what Americans were like 120 years ago, for Christ sake, you hadn’t even finished Jim Crow yet. People 120 years ago were shitty by today’s standards!

If you have to compare immigrants from 120 years ago to illegal immigrants today in order to find a comparison, then you’ve already fucked up royally.

But that’s exactly what the anti-immigrant side is doing. “My grandparents assimilated immediately!” is an extraordinarily common talking point among those bemoaning the current generation of immigrants; you can’t have missed it. Pointing out that no, Barbara, your grandmama Brunhild Kleinschtupper actually spoke only German and never left the house except to go to the local market to buy sauerkraut is, thus, totally on the table. If the anti-immigrants don’t like that, then they should stop making that inaccurate argument.

120 years ago cars didn’t exist, indoor plumbing was a dream and people still burned candles for light more commonly than the cheap fabric filament lightbulbs that had just been invented ten years previous. You’re comparing apples to elephants….You have to judge today’s people against today’s people, and people from 120 years ago against people from 120 years ago.

120 years ago there was no social safety net, not health insurance, hell…. if you could find a doctor, he’d probably stick leeches on you. America wasn’t a bastion of higher education, immigrants could work or die in a ditch, and so the motivations of immigrants then was completely different than it is now. The needs were different. The candidates were different. Who know’s Tomi’s grandmother could have been an underappreciated genius or a knuckle dragging ogre… I don’t care, because she was a product of her time. Would she have done better than a 2018 immigrant? I don’t care, because today’s immigrant wasn’t even an itch in their father’s pants when gammy Tomi was riding a cholera stricken raft across the Atlantic. What do you think you’re proving here?

So we agree: the anti-immigrant faction should stop saying that previous generations of immigrants assimilated faster than today’s because it’s a) untrue (which is Mendelsohn’s point) and b) it would be irrelevant even if it were true.

Sure “they” should stop saying that, but I’d love to know who “they” are in the context of this discussion, because the comment Mendelsohn was replying to didn’t make that argument.

Tomi may have said that at some time in her past, I don’t have a whole lot of interest in combing her social media, but IF she said that, and that’s what Mendelsohn meant to lambaste, then wouldn’t it have been cool if Mendelsohn actually referenced it with her comment?

Tomi said that current illegal (pretending she was talking about all immigrants isn’t honest) immigrants don’t speak english, and that doesn’t make the cut with current immigration policy. That’s true. It’s obviously true. Mendelsohn’s “Your great great great gammy spoke German” comment is simultaneously a strawman and a red herring. Literally no one was talking about it before she brought it up.

I agree that it’s a weak argument. That’s why I’m wondering why anyone is acting triumphant when they refute it. It’s like a medium-sized rock in the road. Just roll it to the side and move along. When you make a big deal out of it as if defeating it means something, that’s strawman tactics, even if someone is actually making the argument.

Except it’s wrong. We aren’t in 1895 anymore Chris, we are a more skilled, more educated, more knowledgeable people after 120 years of societal evolution, and what may have passed the bar back then does not necessarily pass it now.

Is it your impression that Mexico has not had a similar societal evolution?

Mexico in 2018 against mexico in 1895? You aren’t that dumb Chris… Not everywhere has the same starting point, nor rate of growth, but there’s no doubt in my mind that yes, Mexican society has evolved in the last 120 years.

What’s your argument? That America needs more unskilled labor? I mean…. That may even be true, but if America deemed that it needed more unskilled labor, then it could start immigrating unskilled laborers, that’s how the system works. Unskilled laborers don’t get to decide that America needs them and contravene American law with impunity to fill that need.

I mean…. Real talk here for a second. If America actually deported every illegal man woman and child in America back to their country of origin, there would be a HUGE labor demand… And the floodgate on legal immigration would open by necessity. Literally no one actually wants that to happen, despite what they may proselyte, because it would be society-breakingly interruptive… but the fact remains: If those illegal immigrants weren’t here, legal immigrants would have been brought in, perhaps more gradually, but they would have, to do the labor they do.

My argument is that low-skilled, poorly educated people coming to America in pursuit of a better life isn’t bad for the country.

There is no “floodgate” currently. Illegal immigration has been low for the past decade. I don’t know what the limit on how many immigrants we can take in, but I do know that at the moment we are nowhere near that limit.

“So, then as now, people were coming from less well-off countries to America in pursuit of a better life?

And America still stands?

Huh. It’s almost like low-skilled, low educated people coming to America in pursuit of a better life isn’t bad for the country. Who’d a thunk?”

Your bullshit replies convince no one, because you are lying in so many ways.

You are more interested in ‘scoring points’ and being right than have an honest discussion… and this is why your side will lose, ultimately… or there will not be a United States. Your side is not sustainable… which is the goal of your side anyway, since you hate America so much.

There is a substantial difference in the patterns seen between 19th Century immigration and today’s immigrants: In the absence of a social safety net, approximately 50% of that generation’s immigrants returned home within a few years, unable or unwilling to assimilate. Modern-day immigrants tend to remain longer, with those who fail to assimilate still finding support from social programs such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); food aid such as the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program; Medicaid; and housing assistance in the form of rent subsidies and public housing.

We can certainly have the argument over whether modern immigrants are a net economic benefit or a net economic drain. I’m certain the wealth of evidence supports the former.

But note that that’s a different argument than “It’s illegal, dummies.” Jack accused Mendelsohn of conflating the two, but she didn’t; really, if you watch the whole Tomi Lahren segment on Jesse Watters’ program like I did, it’s clear that they conflated the two arguments throughout. But that’s ok, because they’re conservatives arguing against further immigration (both legal and illegal).

Let’s be REALLY honest here, this is the clip we’re all talking about:

First off: Tomi did not say that her grandparents integrated faster, which is the strawman you tried to build earlier.

Second off: Throughout the entire discussion, she seemed pretty clear that she was talking about the rule of law, sure… There was talk about merit, and that makes sense, because a determination of merit is part of the process in which immigrants come to America legally. If those topics seem like they get tied together often, it’s because they’re tied together in reality. But what isn’t tied to current reality is the use of 120 year old immigration policy with immigrants that were dead before either of our parents were even born to try to demonstrate what… hypocrisy? In someone advocating against illegal immigration. No one brought up 120 year old immigrants before Mendelsohn, and it made no sense for her to do it: It’s irrelevant to 2018 immigration policies.

Thus far, everything Chris argues fails because he, typically, chooses to equate actual legal immigration with the problem at hand: illegal entry. As stated many times in this thread alone,they are not the same thing. I am sure he knows better.

“We can certainly have the argument over whether modern immigrants are a net economic benefit or a net economic drain. I’m certain the wealth of evidence supports the former.”
No separation at all of legal vs. illegal immigrants; the equation conflates them.

Even if someone wanted to make the argument that illegal immigrants are a net benefit to society, which I think is probably closer to a wash than anyone wants to admit, what they can’t argue in good faith is that illegal immigrants are a greater net benefit to society than legal immigrants.

Even if someone wanted to make the argument that illegal immigrants are a net benefit to society, which I think is probably closer to a wash than anyone wants to admit, what they can’t argue in good faith is that illegal immigrants are a greater net benefit to society than legal immigrants.

I don’t like the “illegal immigrants are a drain” argument because it most probably isn’t true…At some level, they do add to the economy, and that benefit when put against the costs involved in enforcement probably washes out as a nominal net benefit. They’re only a drain when you consider the margins and compare the benefit of legal and illegal immigration, but that marginal drain absolutely exists, making it a significantly stronger argument.

Up thread you open at least two comments by labeling those you disagree with as “anti-immigrant” where it is pretty clear that those commentators are opposed to illegal immigration. I don’t recall anyone advocating closing the shutters and pulling in the latch-string to stop all entry.

You should either be precise about what form of entry by foreigners you refer to at various times, and/or become comfortable with how your comments are received.

The only specific individual I have singled out as anti-immigrant is Tomi Lahren.

If you want to look back at the image I posted to support that characterization and still claim she is simply anti-illegal-immigration, you’re free to do so, but you’d have to explain what Syrian refugees have to do with illegal immigration.

“You’d have to explain what Syrian refugees have to do with illegal immigration.”

I can do this, it’s actually not that hard.

See…. There are two common ways that people immigrate illegally: By overstaying a Visa, and by jumping the border. Because Syrians have no way of hopping an Ocean, and because the average Syrian doesn’t have the means to get paperwork that would pass muster or the means to afford the flight, illegal immigration is almost impossible for the average Syrian.

So one might reasonably ask: “Why do people have problems with Syrian Refugees? They aren’t illegally entering the country! Maybe it’s racism!”

And the answer is: Because the reason people don’t like illegal immigration is more than just the fact that it contravenes the law. I think we’ve already settled that immigration into America is finite, and because American immigration is finite, it makes the most sense to take in the people who display the most merit. The refugee screening process contravenes that process; Sure, you might not take in active terrorists, but you’re still taking in uneducated, non-English speaking people from an active war zone.

Ah, Seattle. I could chuckle amusedly from afar as their idiotic city council wrecks a once-great city if I weren’t watching my own local city government do the very same thing, for the very same reasons (progressive lunacy).

I can take some small comfort, though, that Austin hasn’t yet purchased a bankrupt bike-share company and shut it down after just one year, or spent $12 million per mile for bike lanes that were supposed to cost one fourteenth of that.

All that to say that ignoring simple economics to implement idiotic policies seems to be a common feature of lefty cities.

Yeah, well, our homeless people can get better “services” than your homeless people! And we recycle more! Until Austin protesters are willing to trash their own downtown, AND tax the most liberal businesses right out of town (Starbucks, Amazon), we can’t take Austin seriously here in the Northwest.

Don’t get me wrong, Joe, I’m not proposing a competition for “most idiotic city government”. Seattle would win hands-down. But I think that’s only because Austin still has a few Texans left in it (slowly being pushed out by leftist refugees from failed states like California, though).

Austin: “Let’s budget $25 million for a tunnel to alleviate flooding in a downtown creek, but have it actually cost $160 million, not actually mitigate any flooding concerns, and be structurally unsound after two decades of construction and delays.”

The notion that immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries assimilated much more quickly than today is largely untrue. In fact, most Americans in the early part of the 20th century believed that the failure to assimilate by Lahren’s ancestors and millions of others like them was a matter for grave concern. These days, we read over and over again that the laws passed in the 1910’s and 1920’s restricting immigration were motivated primarily by racism. But that is a gross distortion. If you read political commentary at the time when those laws were debated, you will certainly find discussion of race (usually referring to what we would now call “nationality,” not to what we now call “race”), some of it quite offensive to modern sensibilities.

But the most important concern expressed by immigration restrictionists was that too many immigrants were failing to assimilate. Most immigrants were not becoming citizens. Consulting my grandfather’s trusty, albeit brittle and yellow, 1924 World Almanac, I see that in 1914, the last year before the first restrictive immigration act was enacted, the Census Bureau reported that there were 1.2 million immigrants to the United States but only 0.1 million naturalizations.

The vast majority of immigrants moved to a few large cities in the North. Census figures in 1910 revealed that in most major northern cities, Americans born of parents who had been born in America (as shorthand, in order to avoid wordy repetition, I’ll call them “American-Americans”) were outnumbered by immigrants and their children. In many cities, the number of immigrants was more than twice the number of American-Americans, and the number of immigrants and their children (about two-thirds of them born to two immigrant parents) was often three to four times the number of American-Americans.

Moreover, most immigrants clustered in insular ethnic neighborhoods where they continued to speak their native languages and follow their native customs, standing largely outside the broader American society. In the 1910 census, the population of the United States was 92 million, of which 33 million were immigrants and their American-born children. Of those 33 million, 23 million told the census that English was not their primary language, with 3 million admitting that they did not speak English at all (although the actual number was generally believed to be much larger). Those heart-warming Italian, Irish, Jewish and other ethnic neighborhoods that you see in countless movies and books? There was a widespread conviction that those neighborhoods were a serious social problem. They were viewed, not unfairly, as encouraging their inhabitants to maintain dual loyalties or primary loyalty to their native countries, perpetuating European ethnic hatreds that imported from their native countries, breeding ethnic criminal gangs (Irish, Italian, Jewish and others), fomenting anti-democratic political tendencies, and most of all, undermining America’s sense of itself as a people joined by common values and purposes. Most Americans believed that something should be done to induce people in those neighborhoods to assimilate into the mainstream of American society; and that this necessary assimilation would never happen if immigration were not curtailed.

In addition, it is not generally recognized that the restrictive immigration laws were accompanied what was called the “Americanization movement,” which was viewed as a vital part of the program to solve the problem of non-assimilation. This movement was a strenuous effort, sometimes well-organized and other times spontaneous, by the government, civic groups and private individuals (most notably the movie industry) to turn immigrants into assimilated American citizens. The most significant efforts were educational, carried out not only in the public schools but also through widely available adult education classes, teaching immigrants and their children about American history and civic institutions (all portrayed in a favorable light); staging large-scale patriotic events and public celebrations of traditional American holidays; disseminating movies and literature with patriotic themes; encouraging immigrants to become naturalized citizens; and above all by teaching immigrants English, requiring their children to speak English at school and establishing widespread, free or inexpensive adult education English classes, often sponsored by employers. (The slogan at the time was, “Many peoples, one language.”) It was a combination of immigration restrictions, the Americanization movement, compulsory ethnic mixing in the armed forces during World War II, and in the end the abandonment of ethnic urban neighborhoods for ethnically mixed suburbs, that drove assimilation.

I fear that the problem today is not that immigrants and their children are failing to assimilate – most of their kids learn passable English from TV and rap songs, don’t they? — but rather that they are assimilating to a sick culture of grievance, resentment and rejection of what were formerly considered core American values.

[For the record, the other two major concerns most frequently identified by immigration restrictionists were not race but:

1. The flood of immigrants was driving down wages for ordinary working Americans. The strongest supporters of immigration restrictions were the labor unions. The strongest opponents were the rich, who benefited from cheap servants for their homes and cheap workers for their factories. They cheerfully acknowledged that immigrants drove down wages, but they insisted that was a good thing in a free market. The most common epithet directed by immigration supporters against restrictionists in the early 1920’s was not “racist” but “Bolshevik.”

2. Immigrants brought disorder and crime. Some of this was attributed to the race (nationality) of the immigrants. But the reason given at least as often was that far too many immigrants were clustered in the demographic (young, single men, often unemployed) that was most prone to drunkenness, violence and crime.)]

Great comment, and a comment of the day, though I don’t know who is claiming that today’s legal immigrants are assimilating more slowly than earlier immigrants. My grandmother was the only one in her family who made a point of speaking English, following the news, and voting, for example. Her sisters and brother might as well have been living in Sparta. The point is that unlike the period of neighborhoods stocked entirely with non-English speakers, non-assimilation means isolation, bad jobs (or badly done jobs) and public assistance. In my grandmother’s time—pre-service and technology-based economy— that was not the case. Also the US schools did not pander to non-English speakers as they do now, vastly over-burdening the schools while undermining their ability to teach English-speakers what they need to know.

Immigrants were also not encouraged to be defiant regarding their lack of assimilation, as the Left encourages to today (all the better to isolate and exploit them as low-information voters).

This is a critical problem. You go into my local courthouse and you see notices in English, Spanish, Somali, Hmong, and Russian. Non-assimilation is facilitated. But, the trade-off is access to the legal system, which is a good thing. The balance is to incentivize assimilation and, at the same time, minimize isolation.

And, let’s not forget about the money, which can always be a driver. Slight digression: my partner immigrated from Poland. He knew almost no English (which made law school difficult), but he speaks pretty well now. He has three kids. At a parent-teacher conference, he revealed that the primary language spoken at home was Russian. As a result, the school wanted to put his kids in ESL, or ELL classes. He refused. He asked me why they would want to do that when his kids speak perfect English. My only guess was that, if the school could put them in the ESL/ELL box, there was money to be had from some level of government (probably the feds).